Date of Award

12-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Primary Advisor

Dr. Andrew Menzies

Secondary Advisor

Dr. Christopher L. Flanders

Committee Reader

Dr. Mason Lee

Abstract

This Doctor of Ministry thesis presents a project designed to meet a need of the Eden Community, an intentional Christian community, regarding the pathways it uses to shape regenerative Christian culture among college students in its apprenticeship program, ARC. In this thesis, I connect the pragmatic aims of the Eden Community to theological foundations regarding the importance of ecclesial diversity and creative contextualization, features that empower the church to embody a variety of life-giving “alternative stories” with the capacity to present the gospel as truly good news to the entire world.

In this project, a team of nine stakeholders met together virtually for a series of eight sessions, designed according to the principles of Appreciative Inquiry. The team refined the ARC Pathways so that they more fully reflect and transmit elements of the Eden Community’s own subculture, cultural components that manifest the community’s paradigm of regenerative Christian culture. At the conclusion of the project, these team members, as well as a focus group and two outside experts, supplied data that, along with the initial and refined ARC Pathways, I then analyzed to determine the degree to which the pathways reflect and successfully transmit the Eden Community’s subculture. The data indicated that some cultural components are strongly reflected in the ARC Pathways, while others need further strengthening for greater effectiveness. Areas for future growth notwithstanding, the team was successful at achieving its goal, and the process proved generative, joyous, and itself an effective form of cultural transmission.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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